Fantastic sampler! I cannot wait to read the full version of The Marsh King's Daughter.

I really enjoyed this brief smaller of The Marsh King's Daughter. It caught my attention right away and made me want to know what happens next. I was declined for the ARC of the full copy on NetGalley, so will have to wait until publication date to read the rest of the book. After I read the entire book,, I will submit my reviews to Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iBooks. I am very anxious to continue on and see where the story goes. Going by the 1st Chapter, it seems like it will be a great one!

Very fascinating , Helana is distinctive sound and the ending of chapter one make me what to read more.

It's a preview, therefore not really able to rate or comment on. I generally do not choose previews on purpose so it likely wasn't well marked.

As I only received the prologue and first chapter of this book it is difficult to give a review. I did like the start with the everyday school run interrupted by startling news on the radio. This is certainly a book that I would be happy to read more of.

Unsettling opener with the translation of Hans Christian Andersen's story of the same name but it sets the scene well because it's a dark fairytale and I suspect what follows may be a darker, modern-day equivalent.

Karen Dionne wastes no time in telling us the kind of story to expect by having Helena mention her mother and why you would know of her. But then she switches gear and I love how Dionne builds the suspense from here. We're introduced to her main character out running a daily chore, so we get to know the normal side of her, while also hearing her inner thoughts in a short space of time. And then she steadily ramps up the danger levels and suspense by dropping in details of her character's unusual past - there's a fraction of misdirection when we first hear the news report, until she delivers that killer last line (of the extract). Excited to read the rest now and see where this goes, and if she'll put her own daughter in jeopardy.

This is quite difficult to judge, maybe another chapter or 2 would have been more beneficial as it literally just getting started.
It could have promise, but I think that its a little slow to begin.

Wow, what an opener. Karen's writing draws you into the story and leaves you with that cliff hanger. I loved the opening chapter which set the tone of the story so well.. I so desperately wanted to be able to turn the pages to find out what happens next. I can't wait to read the rest of the book.

Just a preview, really enjoyed the writing and am interested in the full book now!

Loved this sampler!! Can't wait for the book to be published, it's top of my list right now!

I was hooked by the blog and the opening chapters I read did not disappoint. The concept is not a new one and, as similar stories appear in the press more regularly, is appearing more in works off fiction. However, Dionne has created characters that I instantly cared about and was interested in. Her setting intensifies feelings of claustrophobia and there is a subtle voyeuristic atmosphere established in this sampler. I cannot wait for publication!

The preview was excellent, have to wait for the remainder.

This sampler of The Marsh King's Daughter was enough to make me very interested in reading the full book as soon as I can. The author has set up a very intriguing premise and I'm excited to learn more about Helena's time as a child and dealing with her father's escape from prison as an adult. Plus, there's a blurb from Lee Child on the cover and he's one of my favorite thriller writers, so what more could I want? I will definitely be picking up a copy of The Marsh King's Daughter ASAP.

The part I read was thrilling .it made me want to buse it when it comes out

This book was not a suspense thriller nor did it "chill me to the bone." Mostly it pissed me off. Sorry, but amid all the glowing 4 and 5 star reviews, there is my takeaway. I detested the main character, Helena, and I am sorry for the couple of hours I spent of my life reading this.

It had a great premise, the daughter of a man who abducted a young teenaged girl and kept them in the marsh for years, comes of age and FINALLY decides to DO SOMETHING about the life she is living though she worships her horror of a father. The "Marsh King" is a sadistic bastard, a narcissitic sociopath, who tutors his daughter on the ways of the native Americans who lived in the upper peninusla. The skills he teaches her are meant only to recreate Helena in his image, and take her love away from her poor mother. Helena has little use for her abused mother wanting only to please her monster of a father. Helena learns to hunt, track and kill. When she makes a mistake, she is punished. But does that affect her feelings for her father -- oh no. Yeah, I get that she's a child but she totally lacks any empathy or insight. When help comes in the form of a lost snowmobiler, she finally decides it's time to take her mother away.

This was a very depressing book. I am sure that I will be in the minority not finding anything redemptive in Helena's final stand. Too little, too late. I really wanted to like it, but I didn't. Every little petty thought Helana had made me angry. I get that she and her mother were VICTIMS, but instead of being some sort of solace to her mother, she chose her father's path. Sure she was a bit afraid of her father, but she did not really see his evil -- oh yes, I understand that he was all she knew of men. Their isolated life, their lack of any information about the world outside. Helena had no empathy for her mother's plight nor did she care much about her. Definitely Helena was the Marsh King's Daughter above all else. She had a bit of psychopathy herself!

Thank you to NetGalley and Edelweiss as well as the publisher for the e-book ARC to read and review. It was just not my cup of tea and I wouldn't recommend it.

Thanks for the chance to read the sampler. It's a brilliant way to tease readers and may them want to purchase the book. That said, what I read was captivating and mysterious. It did bring up some intense feelings for me which was difficult. I will definitely make sure I finish this one.

I found this book truly unsettling, finishing it feeling distinctly off colour. It seeks to ally itself to novels such as Room or Forgetting Zoe but there was something about it that unnerved me even more than either of those. While Room emphasises the redemptive power of the bond between Jack and Ma, something which has helped them both to survive a horrific trauma and then Forgetting Zoe suggests that the pain can be overcome and left behind, The Marsh King's Daughter seems to have a darker message. While noting that her mother's story is generally listed alongside that of Amanda Berry and Jaycee Duggard, Helena is dismissive of her, barely names her, has little true loyalty. Born two years into her mother's captivity, Helena states that while other survivors note that the birth of their child was a source of comfort during their ordeal, the same was not true for the two of them. Helena took after her father, loved him, hero-worshipped him and knew no other way of life. Helena came into her world unaware of any other way of being - I think that what makes this so disturbing is that for so much of her childhood, she could not see the evil around her.

The narrative flicks back and forth between the adult and child Helena, with the adult having moved on, changed her name and severed all ties with her past. She is married to Stephen, has two daughters and makes a living selling jam and jellies to local stores and fairs, this being one of the few skills she learnt growing up that was truly transferable. All this is going well however until she overhears a bulletin on the radio that the Marsh King has escaped from custody and instinctively she knows that he will seek to reclaim her, seeing all that she has as his own. But she does have an advantage over the law enforcement agencies who are hunting him - she knows how he works, how he hunts, how he kills and Helena is determined to use this against him. Interspersed between Helena's recollections of her childhood and her present-day pursuit of her father are snippets from Hans Christian Andersen's The Marsh King's Daughter, a fittingly dark fairy-tale which gave Helena's father his name as coined by the media.

I was caught by the similarities in voice between Helena and Rosemary within We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, with the pair of them reminding me of a real-life account that I read a number of years ago which was written by a woman who had had a feral upbringing. For both there is that feeling of the outsider, of observing the human race rather than truly being a part of it. Helena feels offended when people told her afterwards that she must be so delighted to be in the real world. What is so fascinating about television? How is that better than life in the woods? She had loved hunting, living by the land, learning the Native American ways that her father held so dear. She had never longed for escape. It was other circumstances that brought things crashing down and even now, her loyalties are clearly insecure, true allegiances unclear even to herself.

The psychology of Helena's relationship with her father is fascinating - he was the defining force of her upbringing, the ultimate force of programming. He has raised her with his own version of Native American mythology, with Helena astounded at his trial to see his blonde-haired mother watching from the stands. Even all these years after the last time she saw him, Helena is still figuring out who he was, whether he truly loved her, what he wants from her now. Having been brought up to see the world through his eyes, Helena replicated his contempt for her mother. She knew that her mother's word held no weight, that her commands could be disobeyed when it suited. Dionne has created Helena as a true Electra, the girl who loves her father and despises her mother - how could someone raised to be fearless respect someone who has been ripped from their life, someone defeated, a girl who never got to become her own woman?

I think though that Dionne also captures the strange way that we look at victims - we need them to be strong, to be heroines, to have hated their predators and to have retained psychological integrity. Helena's mother was none of these things, she was a victim and she returned home as such, doomed to never quite grow up. And when the twelve year-old Helena was told that her father had kidnapped her mother, she had shrugged because how else did someone get a wife? What's so wrong about kidnapping? Even the adult Helena acknowledges that there was no way that her father could ever have found a woman willing to go and live with him in the marsh and that abduction was his only option. The uncomfortable way that Helena inherited her father's thought processes made her a protagonist who I shivered to be away from.

When girls like Jaycee Duggard, Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry or Gina Dejesus are rescued, society feels this terrible guilt for having failed to spot them, to have let their captors walk among them. We need to believe that the escape marks a happy ending, that they will find redemption. The Marsh King's Daughter considers what happens next, of how you can escape someone physically but how their fingerprints can still be all over your mind. Dionne has clearly worked hard to find her way into Helena's way of thinking to imagine how she might operate as a mother herself, of how she could be both intelligent woman and still retain the inner savage who she lived as until she was twelve. Her husband is loving, albeit still baffled by some of her quirks of behaviour but the detached way in which Helena seemed to observe him made it difficult to believe she truly cared for him. Her decision to withhold the truth of her childhood was understandable but their relationship still felt under-explored. The defining relationship in her life was the one she had with her father, even though it had been decades since she last saw him - how could there be room for a husband? Helena has built herself a life with all the trappings of normality but whether contentment is within her reach is less clear.

Helena would no doubt bristle if someone labelled her as her father's victim but that is what she was. I cringed from the brutality of his punishments, unable to put the book down but longing for the end. Dionne has created a complex and credible psychological realism but the depths of darkness which she reaches took me far beyond my comfort zone. The Marsh King's Daughter does not rule out recovery - Helena has accepted intellectually that her mother tried her best to love her, but then emotionally she still can only feel the distance between them. There are none of the moments of connection which made Room bearable and even at the end, I could only imagine Helena heading back into the wilderness alone, forever defined as the daughter of the Marsh King.

Wow. This sampler grabbed me from the start. It teased with so many stories to be told. I was gasping at the end of the chapter with the revelation heard on the radio. I am devastated i was unable to read on. This is certainly a book I will be buying

Outstanding excerpt. Really looking forward to reading the full novel.

When. I clicked on the book I thought I was going to read an actual book, not a sampler. Bit disappointed. But what I did read was intriguing. Can't wait till the book is released so I can find out what happens.